Inter-thing Synchronization (Luiz Fernando Soares)

In this talk, inter-thing synchronization is considered as a QoS problem in its phases of initialization, negotiation, provisioning, and managing. Intermedia synchronization is taken as example. For the several QOS phases, we will discuss topics such as: infrastructure performance parameters, inter-source timeline synchronization, hypermedia specification languages, authoring tools, intermedia-service admission control, compile-time adaptations, intelligent prefetching, resource reservation in advance, pushed-data carousel management, runtime adaptations, elastic time computation, inter-destination synchronization, ambient intelligence, etc. In all these topics, the state of the art is presented as well as open research issues. The talk will be given in Portuguese.

Banana Pianos and Musical Cartoons: Designing for Musical Tinkerability (Eric Rosembaum)

Eric Rosenbaum wants to amplify your imagination. He is currently a doctoral student at MIT Media Lab, where he spends his days in the Lego Learning Lab as a member of the Lifelong Kindergarten group. He combines his love for music, improvisation, making, and learning to invent new technologies for playful creation. He is the co-inventor with Jay Silver of the MaKey MaKey invention kit. His other projects have included Singing Fingers, an iPad app for finger painting with sound; Glowdoodle software for painting with light and sharing your creation; and MelodyMorph, an iPad app for creating your own musical instruments and playable compositions. Eric holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Master’s degree in Technology in Education from Harvard University. In his spare time he plays the trombone in an afrobeat band and a jazz ensemble.

What if you could build a piano out of bananas? Or invent a new musical instrument made from plants, pants, pop-tarts, papayas, or people? The MaKey MaKey invention kit lets you create physical-digital musical instruments like these and more, without requiring skills in electronics or programming. I’ll also introduce an iPad app called MelodyMorph that lets you create playable musical instruments, compositions, and stories on a touchscreen. I’ll talk about my experiences developing and testing these tools, and share some thoughts on how I design for learning through tinkering.

2050: A Small Travel Through the Previous 50 Years of Smart Media Eco-Systems: Smart Ubiquitous Media Eco-Systems (Artur Lugmayr)

Prof. Dr. Artur Lugmayr describes himself as a creative thinker and his scientific work is situated between art and science. Since July 2009 he has been professor for entertainment and media production management the Tampere University of Technology (TUT): EMMi – Entertainment and Media Production Management (http://www.tut.fi/emmi), and will starting at Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia in December this year. His vision can be expressed as to create media experiences on future emerging media technology platforms. He was the head and founder of the New AMbient MUltimedia (NAMU) research group at the Tampere University of Technology (Finland) which is part of the Finnish Academy Centre of Excellence of Signal Processing from 2006 to 2011. He is holding a Dr.-Techn. degree from the Tampere University of Technology (TUT, Finland), and is currently engaged in Dr.-Arts studies at the School of Motion Pictures, TV and Production Design (UIAH, Helsinki). He managed and coordinated numerous large scale scientific projects on national and international level; was guest scientist at several universities and/or hold guest lectures/talks (e.g. Harvard Medical School/USA, QUT/Australia, KTH/Sweden, UFAM/Brasil, Univ. of Neuchatel/Switzerland); chaired the ISO/IEC ad-hoc group “MPEG-21 in broadcasting”; won the NOKIA Award of 2003 with the text book “Digital  interactive TV and Metadata” published by Springer-Verlag in 2004; representative of the Swan Lake Moving Image & Music Award (http://www.swan-lake-award.org/); board member of MindTrek (http://www.mindtrek.org), founder of the International Ambient Media Association (iAMEA) (http://www.ambientmediaassociation.org), and president of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) SIG eMedia, EU project proposal  reviewer; invited key-note speaker for conferences; organizer and reviewer of several conferences; and has contributed one  book chapter and written over 120 scientific publications. His passion in private life is to be a notorious digital film-maker. He is founder of the production company LugYmedia Inc. (http://www.lugy-media.com). More about him on http://www.tut.fi/emmi.

“This keynote shall be a ‘small travel through time’ of media by revising its previous two decades of rapid development, and giving a visionary outline to its future as ‘smart media environment’ within the next 30 years. Today media industry is confronted with digitalization, emergence of new devices, numerous new business models, and numerous new technologies, which are rendering old traditional ways of thinking obsolete. Previously there was one medium, such as a TV screen or newspaper that was utilized to transmit the message or story. Today it’s an agglomeration of devices creating an aggregation of content – partially in behalves of the consumer in a personalized fashion. Traditional business models flipside, and media companies as e.g. newspaper companies are grasping for immediate solutions to remain competitive and stay afloat. Also, media industry is confronted with a rapid emergence of new technologies, as seen in book publishing, where digital books shapeshift the media landscape. Media designers are confronted to design content interactively, across platforms and delivery systems. However, are traditional ways of thinking in media really obsolete – or do they simply follow McLuhan’s law and transform to something that is based on principles of previous ‘old’ media?

Today’s trends in media industry can be described with the keywords of interactivity, networked, sociability, mobility, experience, and intelligence. Interactive media became pre-dominant with the emergence of new media almost two decades ago with the emergence of the Internet. Social media, global communication, and creating digital communities are grounded on the emergence of new communication patterns that emerged with new technologies, and surfaced since a bit over a decade. These includes trends such as crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, and socializing anytime, anywhere, and anyhow. Today, mobility as major access platform for Internet services and localized services to access content is considered as part of our daily life, and changes our content consumption pattern significantly. The device becomes intelligent, and helps us in assisting in our daily tasks to navigate, locate, and ease communication between peers. Content and services blur and became an eco-system of content, services, and different media. In parallel, devices supporting us in daily tasks become increasingly more intelligent and seamlessly embedded throughout our national environment. These new services overlay our physical world with a digital one, and we access it via ubiquitous devices, such as e.g. Google glasses. Thus we are currently seeing the next revolution in media ecosystems – the development from social media towards intelligent, smart, ubiquitous media eco-systems. These services are offered as part of urban environments, where consumers demand new forms of experiences and increases the demand on media designers in creating eco-systems that promote consumer engagement.

This keynote shall address an audience with a view on media from an artistic content creation, industrial, technical, and human perspective. It shall shade light on the latest trends in media industry, and how a potential future could emerge. The keynote revises current trends as e.g. crowdfunding, digitalization of the value chain, new media design methods, wearable devices, personalized services and decision support systems to support the consumer, digital games, and will give insights in the potential future of media as part of smart media environments. The keynote will be a small travel through the past decades of development of media, and shade light to its ‘smart’ future. The keynote is based on the two forthcoming books: “Convergent Divergence”, and “Information Systems and Management in Creative Industries” to be published by Springer-Verlag in early 2015.

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Why Doesn’t it Look Like it Does on Television?  Using Established Technologies in New and Exciting Ways (Damian Schofield)

“Dr. Schofield is currently Director of Human Computer Interaction at the State University of New York (SUNY). He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia. Prior to this Dr. Schofield was the Associate Professor of Computer Games and Digital Media, in the School of Creative Media at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Before his move out to Australia, he was on the management team of the prestigious Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham, UK.

While working in the UK, Dr. Schofield was also on the management boards of both the Visual Learning Lab (a HEFCE centre of excellence) and the Learning Sciences Research Institute (LSRI). Dr. Schofield also remains a director and major shareholder of Aims Solutions Ltd., a UK based company created in 2000, to provide computer graphics visualisation services and virtual reality based simulation training products to a wide range of public and private sector organisations.

Dr. Schofield has been involved in research examining the use of digital media in classrooms and courtrooms for many years, particularly virtual reconstructions and simulators. He is specifically interested in the representation and understanding of visual evidentiary and educational information (especially using computer game technology) in the these environments. Much of this academic research has concentrated on the investigation of the prejudicial effect of digital media, validation and verification procedures, admissibility and acceptance of digital evidence and the mathematical uncertainty concerned with visual simulations.

Dr. Schofield is regularly used as an expert witness in courts all over the world and has worked on many high profile cases – he has been involved in forensic casework in the UK, Australia, the USA and Malaysia. This work has covered a wide range of forensic visualisation from computational fluid dynamics models to blood spatter patterns at crime scenes, from road traffic accident reconstruction to post-mortem pathology visualisation. A few years ago, he was involved with the facial reconstruction of an Egyptian mummy for a documentary called Nefertiti Reserected shown on the Discovery Channel. He has also worked on research projects for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the USA.”

“A small army of gadgets are fighting for dominance in your living room and as your personal, portable do-it-all device. These gadgets come with lots of cool services, however many of these devices are difficult to use. The key to the future of these devices is not increasing processing power but how will we interact with this increasingly complex technology. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is fundamental to making products more successful, safe, useful, functional and, in the long run, more pleasurable for the user.

This talk will introduce a number of novel emerging technologies and discuss their importance. There are a number of problems inherent in the shift in society to an increasing reliance on technology and a number of facets of this trend need to be examined. At first glance, many new innovations may be seen as potentially useful in many situations, and they are often treated like any previous technology regarding their use and acceptance. However, perhaps we need to take special care and attention due to the inherently pervasive nature of many new technologies, and the undue reliance that the user may place upon them.

This keynote presentation will also showcase some of the latest developments and new technologies and demonstrate a range of projects underway here at SUNY Oswego. The talk will begin by showing Dr. Schofield’s work applying computer games technology to forensic reconstruction and the results of his research in this field. A number of recent projects from SUNY Oswego will then be showing including augmented reality educational tools, robot theatre, using game technology to learn to play music instruments, virtual art galleries, drone based research and finishing with a demonstration of international, collaboratively produced, films starring robot actors.”